So you guys remember the “secret character behaviour change”? The one that we later found out was fall damage?
Something about that didn’t sit quite right with me, I understand fall damage is something many people find annoying, but in AO we can literally halt all momentum by just pressing m1 at any given moment, meaning fall damage as a feature is hardly impactful.
…
or is it?
What if the secret behaviour change wasn’t really the addition of fall damage, rather the removal of our ability to float in the air while using abilities or m1s?
This would explain the need to gatekeep the change, as it will obviously greatly change the way combat works, upsetting many pvpers and the like.
My proof
In a thread regarding fall damage, Rayman, a tester, mentioned the following:
Notice how he says that you can “slow” your momentum with skills and reflexes, and then mentions parrying or pulling out your glider as the “simpler” solutions to the problem.
If we can completely stop the momentum using any ability or m1, wouldn’t that be the most simple solution?
Besides, as far as I’m aware, the secret behaviour change was never explicitly stated to be fall damage, we just assumed that was it after it was casually shown in a livestream, which is a weird way to reveal a secret that would supposedly make people rage.
All that we really know of it is that it
- Scales
- Applies to players and npcs
- will make people mad
- Is funny and cool
- Doesn’t have that heavy of a gameplay impact (in vetex’s standards)
We also know that some time ago vetex has thought of removing T-jumps in order to make combat more grounded, but decided against it after realizing it was far too late in development.
Yet we recently got this change.
Which seems to do exactly the opposite to what he wanted.
We also got features like the climbing gear and the glider, which are clearly meant to make fall damage less intrusive. But if fall damage is intrusive enough for those features to be added, there’s no way we can still stop our momentum as easily as we do now.
Now I know that in the recent showcases Rayman can be seen still floating while using skills like we do now, but given how controversial this change is, I find it plausible that vetex is disabling the feature temporarily while rayman does his showcases in order to gatekeep the feature. (We also never see him take fall damage, but that might be unrelated)
Conclusion
Based on all this, what I personally think the secret behaviour change really is, is a change to the way air stalling when using skills works. I think we will now keep our momentum while using skills, but have it reduced based on the amount of energy the skill consumes, instead of it completely resetting our momentum.
So an m1, which barely consumes any energy, will barely affect your momentum, but larger, charged skills will have more of an impact on it.
Lastly I find it noteworthy that if this is true, then this will make ult art leaps actually useful now, since they will likely be able to completely negate all momentum with good timing, given the large amount of energy they consume.
